[Amit Shah, a former
Gujarat minister and Mr. Modi’s closest aide, is awaiting trial for the murder
of three people the police suspect of plotting to assassinate Mr. Modi. (Mr.
Shah calls the charges a political conspiracy.) He has made speeches inciting anti-Muslim
sentiment among Hindu voters, including in Uttar Pradesh, the most populous
state in India, despite an outbreak of sectarian violence there last September.]
By Basharat Peer
 |
| Emiliano Ponzi |
AHMEDABAD, India — Late last month I bought an Indian comic book
online. I hadn’t bought one since the mid-80s, when I was a boy and would walk
to the bookstore in my hometown in Kashmir to pick up copies of D.C. and Marvel
Comics, or Amar Chitra Katha, a series based on the lives of major
contemporary, historical and mythological figures in India. My latest purchase,
“Bal Narendra” (“Boy Narendra”), was styled after Amar Chitra Katha.
I turned the pages
with a mixture of anticipation and foreboding. The book purports to tell
stories from the childhood of Narendra Modi, the longtime chief minister of
Gujarat, one of the richest states in India, and the polarizing Hindu
nationalist candidate for prime minister in the ongoing election. The tales are
part of Mr. Modi’s high-octane campaign effort to present himself as a bearer
of good governance, growth and efficiency.
Bal Narendra, the son
of a tea-seller in a small town of Gujarat, embodies many virtues: courage,
wit, diligence, fairness, compassion. He sells tea at a village fair to raise
money for flood victims. In devotion to the religious tradition of his village,
he swims across a lake full of crocodiles and hoists a flag on top of a temple
on an island. When some bullies rough up a weaker child at school, he marks
them by throwing ink from his fountain pen on their shirts and denounces them
to the principal.
The publishers of the
comic book — available exclusively from Infibeam, an Amazon-like online
retailer run by a Gujarati entrepreneur close to Mr. Modi — would have you
believe that now that he is all grown up, Bal Narendra is just as brave, clever
and just. If anything, however, Mr. Modi’s public record paints the picture of
a leader unapologetically divisive and sectarian.
It was on his watch as
chief minister that more than 1,000 people, many of them Muslims, were killed
throughout Gujarat in 2002, when rioting erupted after some 60 Hindus died in a
burning train in Godhra. A Human Rights Watch report that year asserted that
the state government and local police officials were complicit in the carnage.
Mr. Modi has not
visited the camps of the Muslims displaced by the violence or apologized for
his government’s failure to protect a minority. Instead, he has described the
reprisal killings of Muslims that year as a simple “reaction” to an “action,”
namely the deaths of the Hindu train passengers — and has said he felt as sad
about them as would a passenger in a car that accidentally ran over a puppy.
His only regret, he once told a reporter for this paper, was failing to manage
the media fallout.
Even as candidate for
prime minister, Mr. Modi has not given up his sectarian ways. Nor has his
party, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Of the 449 B.J.P.
candidates now running for seats in the lower house of Parliament, all but
eight are Hindu. The party’s latest election manifesto reintroduces a proposal
to build a temple to the Hindu god Ram on the site of a medieval mosque in the
northern town of Ayodhya, even though the destruction of that mosque by Hindu
extremists and B.J.P. supporters in 1992 devolved into violence that killed
several thousand people.
Amit Shah, a former
Gujarat minister and Mr. Modi’s closest aide, is awaiting trial for the murder
of three people the police suspect of plotting to assassinate Mr. Modi. (Mr.
Shah calls the charges a political conspiracy.) He has made speeches inciting anti-Muslim
sentiment among Hindu voters, including in Uttar Pradesh, the most populous
state in India, despite an outbreak of sectarian violence there last September.
The problem isn’t just
about rhetoric. Judging by the evidence in Gujarat, where Mr. Modi has been
chief minister since 2001, a B.J.P. victory in the general election would
increase marginalization and vulnerability among India’s 165 million Muslims.
Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s
largest city, has become a wealthy metropolis of about six million people and
three million private vehicles. Office complexes, high-rise apartments, busy
markets and shopping malls have replaced the poor villages that once dotted the
land. The city has a mass transit system called People’s Path, with corridors
reserved for buses.
But Ahmedabad ceases
to swagger in Juhapura, a southwestern neighborhood and the city’s largest
Muslim ghetto, with about 400,000 people. I rode around there last week on the
back of a friend’s scooter. On the dusty main street was a smattering of white
and beige apartment blocks and shopping centers. A multistory building
announced itself in neon signs as a community hall; a restaurant boasted of
having air-conditioning. The deeper we went into the neighborhood, the narrower
the streets, the shabbier the buildings, the thicker the crowds.
The edge of the ghetto
came abruptly. Just behind us was a row of tiny, single-story houses with
peeling paint. Up ahead, in an empty space the size of a soccer field, children
chased one another, jumping over heaps of broken bricks. “This is The Border,”
my friend said. Beyond the field was a massive concrete wall topped with barbed
wire and oval surveillance cameras. On the other side, we could see a neat row
of beige apartment blocks with air conditioners securely attached to the
windows — housing for middle-class Hindu families.
Mr. Modi’s engines of
growth seem to have stalled on The Border. His acclaimed bus network ends a few
miles before Juhapura. The route of a planned metro rail line also stops short
of the neighborhood. The same goes for the city’s gas pipelines, which are
operated by a company belonging to a billionaire businessman close to Mr. Modi.
“The sun is allowed into
Juhapura. The rain is allowed into Juhapura. The wind is allowed into
Juhapura,” Asif Pathan, a 41-year-old resident, said with sarcasm. “I get a
bill for water tax and pay it, but we don’t get piped water here.” The locals
rely on bore wells, which cough up salty, insalubrious water.
Mr. Pathan has been
living in Juhapura since 1988, when his father, a retired district judge,
bought a house here from a Hindu man. “My father said, ‘When the storm comes,
you don’t get more than 10 minutes to run,"’ Mr. Pathan explained,
referring to the threat of sectarian violence. In the late 1970s and early
1980s, Juhapura was a mixed Hindu-Muslim neighborhood, but with the string of
sectarian clashes in Gujarat — in 1985, 1992 and 2002 — more Muslims began to
move here, seeking relative safety among people like themselves. Prejudice
begets riots, and riots only exacerbate prejudice, and so the population of
Juhapura has almost doubled since 2002.
After
the 2002 riots, Mr. Pathan, a teacher, began tutoring children in Juhapura.
Then he quit his job and, with his father’s support, bought a large patch of
land by the highway that runs through Juhapura. In 2008 he started his own
school. Now, around 1,300 children there attend classes in both Gujarati and
English in airy classrooms. “We simply have to help ourselves,” Mr. Pathan
said.
But self-help only
goes so far, in Juhapura, and elsewhere. A large chunk of Narol, an area on the
southern edge of Ahmedabad, was once a patch of uninhabited brushland that
belonged to a wealthy political family. After Mr. Modi’s government refused to
help relocate victims of the 2002 riots, several secular and Islamic
organizations and small-time Muslims developers got involved. They bought land,
cleared it, and built tenement houses, asbestos-lined roofs and all. About 120
homes were assigned by lottery to Muslims displaced from Naroda Patia, in
northeast Ahmedabad. The cluster is called Citizens’ Nagar, or Citizens’ City,
and wherever you stand in the self-made neighborhood you can see, half a mile
away, a big brown mountain: the largest garbage dump in Mr. Modi’s boom city.
When I walked around
Citizens’ Nagar last week, the brown mountain was burning into thick gray clouds
under a harsh afternoon sun. The wind pushed pungent fumes toward the
tenements. I struggled to breathe and feared I would vomit.
“Every year we have
lived here I feel weaker,” said Mohsin Syed, a wiry 25-year-old from Naroda
Patia who now works as a carpenter in a factory nearby. “I can’t run like I
used to. I don’t eat like I used to.” He complained of pain in his joints, said
he needed surgery for kidney stones, and added, “This place, this pollution,
takes a decade off one’s life.”
His father, Najeebudin
Syed, a large man with a short beard, told me that the many petitions he has
sent to local authorities describing living conditions in the area have been
ignored. “Once a week, they bring garbage from the Ahmedabad hospitals —
bandages, medicine, refuse of all kinds. The smell is so foul, so bitter, that
we know in a minute it is from the hospitals,” he said.
Some days, the
carcasses of dead animals are brought to the dump.
That evening, back in
my hotel room, I read another story from the comic book “Bal Narendra.” The boy
is at a camp of the National Cadet Corps — the Indian version of the Eagle
Scouts — when he notices a pigeon in a tree entangled in the strings of a kite.
Holding a razor blade between his teeth, he climbs up, cuts the lines and frees
the injured bird. I remembered Juhapura’s putrid water and the carcasses on the
brown mountain, and wondered how a Prime Minister Narendra would wield that
blade.
Basharat Peer is
the author of “Curfewed Night,” a memoir of the conflict in Kashmir.
